


From silver to gold: a study in alkahestry.

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [5]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/F, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Xing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2014-02-06
Packaged: 2018-01-11 09:36:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time May and Lan Fan met, silver flashed under the sterile light of the makeshift hospital.</p><p>By the Emperor's coronation, the ribbons of <em>chi</em> connecting them had transmuted into gold.</p><p>Transmutation, <em>noun:</em> change into another nature, substance, form, or condition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From silver to gold: a study in alkahestry.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt N3 on my bingo card, "Rivals to Lovers". It's also technically a collection of May Chang/Lan Fan drabbles, and I intended to add a concluding one at the end - which I will probably edit in at some point - but I ran out of time. Damn you drabble challenge.
> 
> But I might edit this later is the point. There is definitely a concluding moment though.
> 
> The relationships between May Chang and Alphonse, and between Lan Fan and Ling, are more queerplatonic than anything. Speaking of which, I need to write more queerplatonic. I'm totally going to write some May Fan with Scar playing matchmaker, because there do not exist enough fics about May Chang and Scar.
> 
> I've never written something so metaphorical before so please excuse my writing style. I'm breaking it in. If something seems off, it's likely a poorly written metaphor and I apologise.
> 
> I love having two OTPs for one character, one for canonical writing, the other for the long-waited-for femslash. It's the ideal combination.

The first time May and Lan Fan met, silver flashed under the sterile light of the makeshift hospital. Despite the recent trauma of the vassal to the Yao Clan’s lost left arm, she flipped up a kunai and made to slit the throat of the Chang girl: As one of the lowest Clans in the hierarchy, the Changs had never made themselves a threat, but the Yao would never miss an opportunity to further themselves. Fuu would expect her to act no matter her injuries. And the Chang girl responded with equal ferocity, her alkahestry points embedded in the cover of the first book drawn from the bedside drawers. In his gravel-voice the doctor berated them both. They clasped their hands or what remained of them at their waists, bowed, lowered their heads, promised not to fight anymore, and exchanged a single meaningful glance, a sole point of contact, a singular thread running between them: The others of Amestris would not understand, and although the Chang girl and the Yao vassal represented polar opposites of the spectrum.

One a princess, the other a nameless retainer of he who would become the Emperor. One indoctrinated in the rebellious desire to rise from her lowest placement in the ranks, the other primed in a childhood replesent with every possible tool she would need to assist her charge, and fit to battle amongst the top tier of Clans. One reading rippling rivers of _chi_ for the imperfections and irregularities therein, guiding the flow beneath her vibrating fingers, the other strumming the silver ribbons of emotion and intent between teardrop-shaped pools glowing gently within the centre of each living creature’s form, anticipating the future path to intercept with a sharp word or a sharper blade. One yang-loud and bright with a heart overflowing with laughter and tears in tandem, who could rip her chest open for the world to see the pulsing scarlet of her soul, the other born and raised in the silken yin-shadows that swaddle her, who carved walls of steel around her heart and bottled her grief to transform the salt in her tears to the iron in her blood.

And yet the two of them somehow survived existing within the same general domicile without tearing one another’s jugulars free from their necks to rid the world of another writhing crimson viper from the venomous bed of snakes.

 

With blood staining tracks into her pale cheeks like tears down a martyr’s face, the Chang girl knelt at the side of the battlefield with a broken jar cradled in one hand and a broken dream nestled in the other. The dream’s wings fluttered faintly as though yet alive, vaguely burrowing its head into her palm, but by the wheezing gasps and the Chang girl’s hooded eyes, dark not so much from an absence of light as from an enlargement of the pupil, a camera shutter opening more and more widely yet never managing to record the mark, Lan Fan could hear the funeral prayers. She found her prince. He examined the smooth skin of the back of his left hand as if he had discovered his flesh for the first time.

No mark. His Greed had dissolved in a grey cloud of charcoal ash. And with it had dissolved hers. Not Greed, exactly, but something intertwined closely enough for the relief to nearly wash her from her foot to lie sprawled upon the ground. She remained erect.

“My lord,” she said. He regarded her with a side-slip smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Revealed how much he’d aged with or without the homunculus’s meddling. The hairs on the back of her neck saluted her fear as gooseflesh rolled over her forearms. Reaching into her chest and withdrawing the  clay statue of herself before the Chang girl eroded her down to the gold underneath, she unloaded the shimmering future to her prince. With her knees slightly bent and the muscles of her thighs tensed into taut coils, she prepared for one final fight with the golden being to whom she had sworn her life.

He rested his palms on his knees. “All right.”

That he agreed so easily widened her eyes and lowered her lids to a respectful half-mast. Here she could see he who would become Emperor, no longer a scrawny boy of fifteen years curling up in an alley for hours on the off chance that someone would fall for the ploy and purchase him a free meal, but a man with a white dove perched on shoulder and a sheathed sword slung at his hip. He would take the throne and he would turn Xing upside and shake the animals from it, then righten it again and find the imperial entirely empty and prepared to start clean. “My lord.”

She followed him, as she would to the end of the world and beyond. He touched the Chang girl’s head. While her prince finished his good-byes and God-be-with-yous to his Amestrisian brethren, Lan Fan fell into step beside the Chang girl.

“You’ll be coming with us?” she asked in quiet Xingese.

The Chang girl’s stunted panda growled from her lap. Wiping her face, she succeeded merely in smearing the blood over her mouth until her lips flushed a delicate red that somehow drew Lan Fan’s attention. Or perhaps what drew her attention lay within the words, within the words of a language cupped in the silence of her mind for weeks since her return to Amestris. The Chang girl’s mouth lifted. “I guess I am. It’s nice to meet you, Lan Fan. I mean _really_ mee’cha.” Then pink sleeves covered the vassal’s vision and abruptly a warm weight constricted her chest, her upper arms, her back to link at the valley of her spine. The panda runt snapped her teeth around her automail fingers. Normally Lan Fan would punt the foul creature off. Yet the runt released the metal just as quickly, perhaps from the stinging tang of steel or perhaps from the shoulder-shaking reverbations of the girl clinging to her waist as though to a lifeline of hope. Her dream had dug up the holy soil around itself at last to slumber, cicada-like, until its thirteen or seventeen or lifetime years were up.

Something shattered within the vassal’s heart. After a moment of allowing the Chang girl to hug her, Lan Fan sliced herself open to see what had broken and cut her so raw: Her grandfather would be burnt to ash. She would no longer cast a shadow, for to cast a shadow, there must be light. And with only the sable curve of yin upon her brow, her sun had faded into darkness.

Unless the grinning Chang girl in her lap could transmute the sun. Not to swallow God, but to return Him to His heavens.

“Call me May.”

 

En route to Xing, with Lan Fan’s _shifu_ ’s body travelling with them, along with the future Emperor’s (as May quickly discovered, he might as well have expired on the Promised Day for all of the walking he himself did). Lan Fan resolutely carried both over her shoulders and walked on a fine line to the horizon. The desert sun browned her skin; the wind cracked her lips; the sweat rubbed her inner thighs and arms into spitfire welts. May would heal them every time they rested, even for a few minutes (Lan Fan would run their horses to their breaking points and then walk even into the heat; May suspected she had exchanged her soul for quasi-homunculus powers, or that her parents had been spirits of the mountains). Yet she tired. In her trembling legs and her hidden limp and her creased brow. At length May insisted she take one to even the load. Lan Fan teetered on the brink; May pushed her off entirely with a gentle reminder that their travel time would cut shorten. For the rest of the journey Lan Fan carried her _shifu_ upon her back. May, the idiot prince. Despite whatever lingering Yao biases had remained, when May glanced at her dreams, she saw nothing but a fierce pride formerly reserved for her Clan. At least, she called it pride.

 

At the Emperor’s coronation, May stood with the Chang in vibrant pink translucent silks that blared out against the more regal colours of the other Clans. For the first time in generations a Clan had altered the shade of its sigil. And Lan Fan, tapped into the _chi_ of what felt akin to the entirety of Xing at once, found her gaze fixed on the brightness. The brightness, of course, not the princess within the splendorous robes blooming cherry-tipped wings from her back. Pink and gold. Chang and Yao. As the coronation progressed slowly onwards, the summer heat painted an image of the princess sprawled in the Emperor’s golden bed, damp silk transparent and clinging, braids half-undone and whorling wild behind her head, wrists held down by flesh and automail alike. Biting her tongue, Lan Fan slaughtered a pair of assassins from upper Clans. Her prince, now her Emperor, would not know, yet May, fingers like threads of gossamer upon the vassal’s desecrated skin, would. By midnight her wounds had faded to healing petals of a dull rosy tint and her cheeks had swirled to petals of a lethal Chang pink.

“It looks good on you.” May grinned lopsidedly at her. “If you lemme dress you up in Chang, I’ll put on some Yao. Hm? Just to see?”

Lan Fan indicated the sliding screen, but May fluttered her hands as though her wrists had grown feathers. The vassal turned respectfully away as the princess’s silks pooled on the floor, a chrysalis shed to unveil the butterfly trickling with its birth waters and furled in its moist wings. “This seems improper.”

“I’m an alkahetrist. I’ve seen more people nude than you’d care to hear about, trust me. Lan Fan.” The vassal stepped into the rustling dress. The lightness and airiness of outfit whispered its existence from the world; no matter the cloth floating over her form, Lan Fan whirled about and felt the armour stripped away to that golden core over again. The golden core currently seated on the bed, radiant and rare: May had transmuted the sun into her room and poured her light into a cleansing wave.

Sun. Light. Yang.

She caught the gold in a washbasin and streamed it through her hair and splashed it over her face, and she came away dripping in something approaching joy. No, not quite joy. Freedom. Liberty. Self. She swilled the words about her mouth. They tasted of yellow and of rose and of May’s lips. The butterfly taking flight at last.

 

From the side of the throne in her seat as the heir presumptive of Xing, May watched a Ling perched erect and proper in the seat of his throne (in reality she knew he would much rather prop his chin up in the palm of his hand or leave the throne room entirely to ask Lan Fan for a secret spar or a harsh ride on horseback). Beautiful women swayed on their lotus feet and cast their heavily lidded gazes upon the floor to grovel at the Emperor’s golden shoes (if not for the actions seeming improper, May wonders if they would try to lick the floor, too). A thread of sympathy wound from her stomach to the slim waists of the nameless women groomed their entire waking lives to serve as nothing but the wives of an Emperor who refused them one by one; given the opportunity, May would have knelt by their feet and inscribed an alkahestry array to remove the burdensome pain of her souls. From time to time she glanced at the alcoves where Lan Fan patiently observed the world to assure Ling’s safety. A faint smile curved her mouth (Lan Fan would enjoy a competitive knife-throwing contest, she thought, and carved the note onto obsidian in the rampaging volcano of emotion that damned woman elicited). Later she would implore Ling to take on the wives, not to sleep with them so much as to grant them long, wealthy lives. He shook his head. Promised to help the, somehow. But he had to pave a new road for Xing; however far away lurked free choice, he would seize it in a grasp capable of breaching the heavens, wind it about his loom, and weave a shawl to wrap over his nation’s shoulders and remind his people that traditions grow a society’s stable roots rather than slicing off the leaves with a fanged battle-axe of shame.

“You love her, don’t you?”

The Emperor of the Xingese People and the Princess of the Chang Clan stared at one another. In mirrored gestures they tilted their heads (like two birds, although May would claim that she were mimicking Xiao-Mei, the _panda_ , in honour of the symbol of the Chang in place of the phoenix of the Yao).

“Yes,” they said, at the same time. Before he could ask again she nodded, and he drew back, his eyes closed from the world. She probed _chi_ : The maelstrom of conflicting energies strangling one another within his form brought a soft gasp to her lips. She reached, for the plain-skinned back of his left hand, and stroked her thumb not quite in a circle. Although the contact would have sentenced her to death, he merely lifted his eyelids just so for him to consider her expression and her his.

His irises glimmered with a shiny wetness that sank its serrated blade into her soul and tore a raw row of bleeding red through her _chi_ , her senses flailing around her at the flare in the Pulse, the anomaly centred around _her_.

“If you love one another.” Not the beginning of a sentence, but the beginning of the end. By the final word he had leashed his momentary lapse of blazing _chi_ into an internal pool whose surface, at the least, appeared settled, quiet. The tortuous slipping of his timbe from his natural pace to that of his politicians’ wheedling pressed the nail of her thumb into his flesh (the imprinted crescent moon would mark his skin for a day or two and in some distant parallel world coax another word from his throat so constricted and pinched in on itself from his time as Emperor that she doubted he could breathe). “Then who am I to say no.”

“We never asked for your blessing.” May folded her arms over her chest, initially arranging her hands in a display of respect, and then flattening them against her elbows as if she had returned to Amestris.

He dipped his head. A quiet noise like a rattled bell. “But she will. May, I’ve seen the signs, and trust me, _trust me_ , when I say I’m glad she finally . . . that she finally chose something for herself. Some scrap of happiness.” He swallowed; his throat bobbed. “She’s still _mine_.”

The princess kept her arms stubbornly crossed. “She’s her own.”

He laughed, not unkindly. “I meant that she was still my friend and I intend to make her smile at _least_ twice a day if I can. But no wonder she loves you.” His voice softened. “No wonder she loves _you_.”

Externally May paid her respects (she could not imagine the action of impaling herself upon a sacrificial spear, closing one’s fingers around one’s still-beating heart, and hacking it free from its nest of emotions and veins to proffer it to another and smile despite the agony of shredded arteries gushing blood into the vacancy of his chest). Internally she beamed. Now all she had left to do lay in convincing Lan Fan to retroactively unravel her, ah, equivocation into truth.

 

Several years later the younger Elric arrived to learn alkahestry, to listen to the euphonious language, to leap headfirst into the deep culture of Xing. The Emperor welcomed him as a brother-in-arms; Lan Fan, as a steadfast ally; May, as a warm friend. Rumours skittered up and down the palace walls on their many legs of the princess finding a consort in the descent of the Golden Sage. Alphonse paused by Lan Fan’s post early one morning to wish her a mild congratulations. The vassal withdrew her mental kunai to press the lethal edge to the man’s throat. He blinked. “I meant that sincerely, Lan Fan. You make her _happy_. God, you should see the way her face lights up when she’s talking about you; it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I take care of kittens for a living.”

Carefully she slotted back her kunai instead their mental hidden grooves in the armour around her heart and melted the frozen façade of her face. “Like the sunrise in your palms.”

He clapped his hands together. “ _Exactly_. Lan Fan, thank you. Thank you for making her happy. I love her, you know.” She read his _chi_ : not like the love for a brother, but a platonic love so deep and pure that its intensity startled her. And then she recognised it: A deep-seated need for company, for physical touch, for the other’s smile mirrored in her love for her Emperor. She pressed her palm into Alphonse’s shoulder. From the inside of his shirt something _mewed_.

“I love her too.”

He laughed long and loud at that, embracing her until the cat in his shirt started yowling in panic. While he comforted the frightened feline, Lan Fan heard herself chuckling.

The next time the younger Elric arrived, the Emperor welcomed him as a brother-in-arms; Lan Fan and May, as warm friends both.

 

Pave a new road, he’d said. Pave a new road, she’d done. _They’d_ done. Together.

 

“May?”

“Hm?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

Quiet.

“I’m not sure.”

“No, really, what?”

“For teaching me, I suppose.”

“What’d I teach you?”

“Me.”

“Oh. Lan Fan? Did you know that I love you?”

She burst out laughing. She felt remade, her _chi_ a gold drop of distilled sunlight, her yin and yang at peace. “Yes, May. Yes, _that_ much I know.”


End file.
